The Snowden era of journalism

This era of journalism is a significant departure from the way it used to be. | AP Photo

But it’s not been a good relationship. British security officials forced the newspaper’s editors to destroy computers used to store the Snowden documents. To avoid losing all the materials, The Guardian partnered with The New York Times for several NSA-related stories.

In the U.S., the Snowden leaks came out at a touchy moment in press-government relations. The Obama administration had secretly obtained The Associated Press’s phone records, named Fox News’s James Rosen as a criminal co-conspirator and is threatening to send The New York Times’ Jim Risen to prison unless he testifies in the trial of a former CIA analyst charged with leaking information to him.

Text Size

-

+

reset

During a hearing Tuesday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) opened the door on prosecuting Greenwald by asking FBI Director James Comey whether “fencing stolen material is … a crime?”

Comey replied that “it would be” a crime in most cases, but he added that things get “complicated” when the person selling the information is engaged in newsgathering activities. “It could have First Amendment implications,” the FBI director said.

In an interview, Greenwald said he hasn’t been selling the Snowden documents. He added that his work is indistinguishable from that of other journalists, including freelance writers working on stories about national security secrets. He also complained that U.S. officials like Rogers are trying to discourage more reporters from following the story.

“What they’re trying to do is to remove it from the realm of journalism, so that they can then criminalize it,” Greenwald told POLITICO. “The fact that I’ve been more defiant about the U.S. government … makes them want to do something to me more. That fact that I’ve gone around the world doing this reporting in different countries and publishing reporting around the world — that is something they want to stop.”

There’s little doubt Greenwald and other reporters have rankled high-ranking U.S. officials concerned over compromised security. The stories have also forced President Barack Obama to deal with programs he opposed as a senator.

But while such relentless press commitment has kept the NSA front-and-center in the national news — a good thing, civil liberty advocates say — it has also threatened to desensitize the American public as the latest revelation seems almost as mundane as the baseball box scores. Public opinion polls since the Snowden leaks started show Americans still don’t know what to make of the disclosure of so many secret government operations.

Some journalists don’t like what they’re seeing either in their colleagues’ dash to get the next juicy scoop.

Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus fretted that the hunt among reporters has trumped the fact that “no one has come up with a violation of Americans’ civil liberties” in the first wave of Snowden document stories.

“Everyone is using these documents for their own particular purposes,” Pincus said in an interview. “You’ve got all these documents that are classified, and the temptation is to find something new and write about it — even if there’s no greater purpose than ‘I’ve got a classified document, here’s what it says.’”

“I think the temptation to keep using stuff is too much because there is a kind of competition,” he said.

National Journal chief correspondent Michael Hirsh argued in a recent column that Snowden had turned many unsuspecting reporters into activists. While praising Gellman as “one of the very best: intelligent, relentless, scrupulous, and always ethical,” he also questioned a January story The Washington Post reporter co-wrote that described NSA’s effort to build a “quantum computer” capable of breaking virtually all kinds of encryption.

“I wonder if, after all the disclosures that have already touched off a major reassessment of National Security Agency surveillance by the U.S. government, what we’re reading now is more like free advertising for a certain point of view — Edward Snowden’s point of view, that is, as well as that of his comrade-in-outrage, Glenn Greenwald,” Hirsh wrote.

Greenwald said he’s not been shy in trying to inspire more stories from other media outlets that reveal NSA’s secrets without a kowtow to government warnings. “Definitely, that was part of our goal,” he said. “In fact, we wanted to kind of revitalize the idea of what adversarial journalism was about.”

Snowden initially was pretty clear he didn’t want to provide documents to The New York Times because he thought they’d previously been too subservient to the government, Greenwald explained. “This model of journalism, of extreme collaboration between the government and the media, has become pretty discredited in large part over the last seven months because of what we have been able to do,” he said. “Other institutions are motivated now to show they’re not too captive to the U.S. government.”

The Snowden document dump has been “very valuable” as the spark for a much needed debate about the extent of the nation’s surveillance programs since 9/11, said Geoff Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and one of the members of a White House-chartered task force that examined the surveillance programs.

But Stone also cautioned that he didn’t think the reporters who got access to the documents were in the best position to decide what to publish from them.

“I think this has emboldened the press to take more autonomy about decisions,” he said in an interview. “They’re making judgments about what they think is harmful or not harmful based on very little understanding of how to think about what that harm might be. So there’s a kind of recklessness involved in this that’s problematic.”

“I don’t know how to solve it. But I think there really is a danger there of members of the press thinking they know more than they do and making important decisions for the nation based on that,” Stone added. “These are really hard issues that journalism as a profession needs to think about now because it’s come to the fore so much.”

Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee, said reporters, editors and government officials need to re-engage in talks over these issues — picking up on meetings through the Aspen Institute that petered out several years before the Snowden leaks — and perhaps “develop protocols for handling sensitive or national security information prior to publication.”

“To have those kinds of conversations at a time not when it’s 5 o’clock and there’s a deadline the next day,” Brown said in an interview. “But in a more leisurely and relaxed setting, so going forward there’s some basis for better understanding each other when the deadlines do come along, which they inevitably will.”

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story did not include the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press as a co-sponsor of a recent panel discussion.